2017 ANNUAL REPORT

Trusted Analytics

Innovation fueled by the world’s most trusted analytics.

Analytics is the very core of SAS. We’ve been applying analytics to the toughest business problems for more than 40 years. With a commanding 30.5 percent market share in predictive and advanced analytics, we dominate the market because we infuse cutting-edge, innovative algorithms that help customers solve their most stubborn problems and unearth potentially missed opportunities.

SAS continues to dominate the market in predictive and advanced analytics

Our software turns data into intelligence – analyzing streaming data and generating split second decisions that happen at a speed and volume impossible for humans. With a unifying data management and analytics environment, we empower customers to solve today’s challenges and uncover tomorrow’s opportunities. We do this by offering the most trusted analytics everywhere, and to everyone. The SAS® Platform continues to be the foundation that powers AI and other innovations to meet changing business needs.

Customer Intelligence and Decision Management

Analysts continue to position SAS as a leader in marketing technology, most notably in the crucial areas of real-time interactions and digital marketing analytics. Customers expect brands to know what they want, and when and how they want it. SAS helps marketers meet these demands, often in real time, while also enabling smart marketing strategies powered by predictive analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Data Management

Data drives everything. You need to make sure it’s right. Data management is critical as companies are dealing with more diverse types of data than ever before, and need the ability to access, integrate, cleanse and govern data to make it valuable for analysis. It is a key component of the SAS Platform, modularized for rapid results and designed with IT and business collaboration in mind. Recent product enhancements around self-service and smart data preparation, cloud data access, event stream processing, and governance and compliance make it even easier to quickly transform big data into big opportunity.

Fraud and Security Intelligence

Independent analyst firms like Forrester and Chartis have long distinguished SAS as a leader in fraud analytics, recognizing machine learning and artificial intelligence among our key differentiators. SAS fraud and anti-money laundering analytics deliver the most breadth and depth of any solution on the market, enhancing the speed and accuracy of customers’ surveillance and detection capabilities with hybrid analytics that automatically suggests new rules in real time. Intelligent case management, smart automation, and the ability to make decisions faster all help reduce fraud, waste and abuse while also streamlining investigation processes and boosting productivity.

Risk Management

Ninety-nine of the top 100 global banks use SAS Analytics to manage risk. In light of changing regulatory requirements, SAS is helping organizations establish a risk-aware culture, optimize capital and liquidity, and meet new challenges like the new IFRS 9 and CECL accounting standards. Perhaps more importantly, SAS goes beyond helping organizations with compliance, to aiding them with orchestrating and managing models and analytics that benefit their business.

Cloud

Cloud computing was designed to be transparent. All of us use it every day, whether we know it or not. However, we understand our customers and partners have a strategic view on this landscape. They have a vision that cloud infrastructures, partners and services are key to advancing their initiatives more economically, with reduced risk, and liberate their people to make decisions on data without regard to where they store it. SAS is supporting this vision by reinventing how we think about analytics in the cloud, and completely embracing this view. In 2018, SAS will expand even further how we exploit cloud platforms and ensure our customers’ success for generations to come.

Midmarket Emphasis

While faced with the same industry challenges as their larger counterparts, midmarket companies have different purchase behaviors. They often operate on smaller budgets, with less access to sophisticated enterprise technology solutions. Leaders in the midmarket must focus on optimizing marketing capabilities with fewer resources to create deeper customer experiences. Some of the biggest brands, like the New York Mets, are often the smallest companies, with just a couple hundred employees. That small team still has to keep 40,000 fans happy at every home game. SAS helps the Mets use their staff and messaging tools to deliver the right messages to the fans, while reporting the success of the campaigns to owners and managers.

All of this, combined with SAS’ strong partner ecosystem and portfolio of results-as-a-service, managed analytics service provider and software-as-a-service offerings, help customers of all sizes implement technology in ways that best fit their needs and those of their customers.

SAS has been able to retain authority in the advanced and predictive analytics market and continue to grow year over year. SAS’ deep roots in advanced analytics and commitment to R&D are two things that help SAS stay at the top of the category.

Dan Vesset, Group Vice President of Analytics and Information Management at IDC

Succeeding in an analytics economy

Using analytics to suggest actions to business leaders, analysts, data scientists and customer service teams is fueling what we call the analytics economy. The analytics economy, simply put, is the combination of data, analytics and collaboration. Each insight sparks the next, and the value of insights compound just like interest on a savings account. This is all possible now because we have accessible data, fueled by advances in computing power and connectivity, and interpreted by more powerful analytics. Analytics must be anywhere data resides.

We want anyone, regardless of skill level, who has access to data be able to solve their analytic problems. Doing so harnesses the curiosity, observations and insights and unleashes the intellectual potential of your entire organization – from executives and data scientists to everyone in the business.